A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

Today the remastered version of the original Doom 3 game has been released in the form of Doom 3 BFG Edition or at least in North America with Europe launch following on October 19th. And aside from the slightly improved graphics, audio and the extra levels the BFG Edition also comes with native stereoscopic 3D support built in (it includes 3D support on consoles as well). The game supports Side by Side (Full and Half SbS) as well as Over/Under and Interlaced (Row-Interlaced/Interleaved) output modes for 3D HDTVs, both active and passive as well as Quad Buffer output mode that works fine with Nvidia’s 3D Vision (the game uses OpenGL-based engine), but you should count Doom 3 BFG as an exclusion and not expect that other OpenGL games will work as well from now on with 3D Vision.

In the case of 3D Vision, as already mentioned the game uses native stereoscopic 3D rendering and only the output goes through 3D Vision, so the normal hotkeys and controls will not work. You need to enable the Quad Buffer 3D mode from the game’s settings menu in order to activate the stereoscopic 3D rendering for 3D Vision (you should also have the latest 306.97 WHQL drivers installed), the level of depth is being controller also though the 3D Options menu in Settings by using the Viewing Offset slider. If you are having trouble activating the stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision make sure you are running the game at a resolution with 120Hz refresh rate and you have activated Vsync in the game settings.

The 3D Vision profile is rated as Excellent, but the game looks a bit too flat by default for my personal preferences and there is of course no convergence adjustment present in the menu. And while the game does look quite good in stereo 3D mode on 3D Vision, worth playing to refresh the memory of the original Doom 3, it is not that immersive, so I’m more interested to see how it will look when played in stereo 3D mode with the Oculus Rift, but will have to wait until the next month for that (hopefully).